Occasionally—okay, frequently—my wife asks me if I have done something that needs to be done. When I look at her blankly and say, “No. Was I supposed to do that?,” she says “You didn’t see the list I put on your desk?” as she scans the various disorganized stacks of paper. Then she makes me […]
The power of the word “classical” cannot be underestimated, communicating as it does the ideas of excellence, truth, order, discipline, and beauty. It brings to mind something that has withstood the test of time and by virtue of this fact, something that participates in some way in the timeless and the eternal. When we examine […]
When we raise or teach young children, we must do so with the understanding that our Christian children are simultaneously citizens of a temporal realm and citizens of a heavenly realm. In both realms they are in need of Truth. In the temporal realm, Aesop’s fables have been prized as an ideal pedagogical vehicle. They […]
The most important part of the curriculum for classical education is what we call the humanities. They are an expansion of what the medieval system called the trivium—the three subjects of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic—which constitutes the language of the humanities as mathematics is the language of the sciences. Grammar means the structure of language, […]
What has the Greek quest for excellence and order and beauty to do with the Hebrew quest for the living God? This is the question the Church Fathers asked themselves, a query that we still must raise from time to time. And in our day in particular, it is the question that Christian educators in […]
I read The Classical Teacher for the same reasons you do: to gather information and to garner inspiration. When it was suggested that I devote this article to reasons for studying the fine arts, I happily agreed. In truth, the short version of the topic would fit into three sentences. 1) The arts are critical […]
The expression “Athens and Jerusalem” is a familiar one in Western cultural history. It denotes two very different cultures: one a culture of reason and the other a culture of faith. So different were they that they became the subject of a raging debate in the early Christian centuries. As a matter of historical fact, […]
“I am giving teachers a choice,” wrote the young Emperor Julian the Apostate in the summer of A.D. 362, not yet a full year into his reign. If they think the ancient writers were wise . . . then let them be the first to rival those authors’ piety toward the ancient gods. Or, if […]
How we approach a book can parallel the way we approach life itself. We can spend our time merely in pursuit of pleasure or we can strive toward a higher goal—the pursuit of what John Henry Newman calls the “philosophical habit of mind.” We would never dismiss the pleasure that reading can bring, but we […]
Imagine for a moment that we had never heard the names of Greece and Rome. What should we lose by our ignorance? Those of us who read poetry would find much that was unintelligible in English authors, in all English poets, I think, without exception, from Chaucer to Rupert Brooke. We should not know in […]